9 ms·

An Amateur Porno Set Off a Federal Witch Hunt

215 points by eplanit 8y ago

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
The beginning talks about how likable the guy is. Greatly discusses the legal trouble his film caused. The ends with him agreeing how the film sucks and maybe the prosecutor was right! (EDIT: he says this as a joke, apparently this needs to be pointed out?) ... I get it. That’s a good story and he absolutely does come off as a likable guy.
- unknownsavage 8y ago
  For people who haven't read the article this is extremely misleading: > The ends with him agreeing how the film sucks and maybe the prosecutor was right! He says that, only as a joke that it's so bad it should've been illegal. While in reality a great mis-justice was done to the man, and he was railroaded into accepting a plea-deal due to the gravity of the unfair charges.
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    Yea, that’s the point. I don’t remember saying “don’t read the article”. He makes a joke about his previous work and that’s a likable thing to do.
jseliger 8y ago
The '70s seem to have been an interesting time: https://longreads.com/2019/04/29/what-i-learned-from-doing-amateur-porn/ https://longreads.com/2019/04/29/what-i-learned-from-doing-a... . Link is all text and presumably SFW, but caveat emptor.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  I remember in an interview, Henry Miller contended that in the time before there was lot of media portrayals of sex that people actually engaged in sex more. It seems like the 70s were something of the time when the media began honestly representing the social undercurrent of sex. But that representation was perhaps part of it going away.
  - dkarl 8y ago
    I think when something is pervasive but hidden, there's an urgent need as members of a social species to find out and become part of it. When it's discussed so openly, there's no fear of being out of the loop, just a decision of whether you think it's worth pursuing or not.
  - Larrikin 8y ago
    There was a sexual comedy that came out some years ago that said the openness of sex led to an increase in social acceptance of more things out the norm. The main characters however complain that they missed out because they grew up in the 80s when HIV hit which led to a massive backlash and obvious public health scare. The characters are all friends and they eventually plan a party based on what they think they missed out on. The theory makes a little more sense to me.
  - droidist2 8y ago
    The 70s were also the last decade before HIV/AIDS, I always thought that had a big impact.
kurthr 8y ago
Seems like maybe the writers of Boogie Nights were aware of this fiasco...
kgwgk 8y ago
What's "amateur" about that? It seems that the word appears only in the title. Edit: he had a $25k budget at least (over $150k adjusted for inflation) and while it was his first movie he hired professional performers and the intention was the commercial exhibition of the film in movie theaters (as it did happen).
- Nevermark 8y ago
  He was clearly an amateur since he had never made any kind of movie. But his intent was to make a professional/commercial film. They are not necessarily disjoint concepts. To top that off, at the end of the interview he gives himself a humorous critique suggesting he found his own work failed to make the professional grade.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    I wouldn't classify as "amateur" a commercial movie where the lead roles are played by professional actors, but that may be just me. The downvotes I got agree with you. (Being a bad movie may make it look "amateurish", but that's something different.)
    - reallydude 8y ago
      > a commercial movie where the lead roles are played by professional actors, I'm not sure you've gotten anywhere, describing what professional means, when you make it dependent on other entities as an explanation. There are plenty of bad SAG actors. What about just saying "union production"? Although I think that's the minimal bar, there have been non-union successes...which don't look professional to me. eg https://www.reddit.com/r/acting/comments/a59tum/what_are_the_most_successful_nonunion_films_if_any/ https://www.reddit.com/r/acting/comments/a59tum/what_are_the...
      - kgwgk 8y ago
        Are you suggesting that films can be classified as either “union” or “amateur”? Star Wars is an amateur film then. And saying “amateur porno” is redundant.
vezycash 8y ago
Summary: Young man has a passion & dream to make movies. He has a thriving business but it's not enough to fund the movie. His friends agree to fund a movie but with a clause - it must be a porno movie. He researches existing literature and it sucks. He won't make porn. He'll make a real movie that also has explicit sex. He shoots normal scenes first, and sex scenes later. Sex scenes has some issues like the actors unable to get erection and him not knowing how to direct the scenes. Movie is finished. He edits, distribution says he must include at least one lesbian scene, some cum shots... things he'd cut out. Movie is a success in theaters and gets sold out every single day and then all hell breaks loose. The police comes after him. Lots of complaints were sent to officials - some by people who hadn't actually watched the movie. The film maker had used a property owned by the church without permission and the church was the force behind the investigations. The court case was a sham. The investigators invokes anti-fornication laws 100s of years old. And the cops (probably) sets the film maker up. One of the lead actors commits suicide just as the case becomes a federal one. The government takes all the earnings of the film, fines him, bans him from film making for a few years and gives him a suspended jail sentence.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  Are you implying laws should be ignored after a few years go by? That’s not how laws work. Many of the laws that our important to daily life are hundreds of years old.
  - bradleyjg 8y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude
  - madsmith 8y ago
    I think that’d be a wonderful thing if all laws had a natural sunset clause and were forced to be renewed to see if they confirm to the standards of the current society. Private lewdness was one of the charges. Even the prosecutor said that it was all a bit over the top but he had these laws as tools so he used them.
rayiner 8y ago
The more I learn about the 1970s the more the 1980s makes sense to me.
- sharkweek 8y ago
  I was born in the 80s so I have zero context for either decade. Recently watched the CNN documentaries on each decade and it was truly eye opening how nuts things were essentially every decade in one way or another. But above all of then, the 70s seemed like the WEIRDEST time to me. Highly recommend the documentaries - super informative. Was fun to re-live the 90s and 00s a bit too.
chinathrow 8y ago
Meanwhile the former Uber exec and now a16z general partner Andrew Chen is calling the Uber drivers "underclass". I have no words. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1125084951387357184 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1125084951387357184
- eugeniub 8y ago
  How are these two things related?
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    I assume in "having no words"? looks totally unrelated to me too
ohashi 8y ago
How unapologetic the prosecutor still is offends me. Trying to use anti fornication laws from 1796 and knowing it's a miscarriage of justice? Yet still thinks it's the right decision.
- devereaux 8y ago
  And he has blood on his hands. One of the actors committed suicide. There should have been some prosecution: not of the film maker, but on those who abused their power to harass people to the point of suicide.
- rayiner 8y ago
  The laws were on the books, and the public's opposition to what the movie-maker was doing seems to fit in with the intent and scope of the laws. Maybe you can blame him for selective enforcement, but I don't think that qualifies as a miscarriage of justice. (That is, of course, assuming we take at face value that his denial that he didn't steal and ship a copy of the movie to Oklahoma.) The prosecutor took measures to avoid normalizing what he and the community saw as deviant behaviors. That's one of the key purposes of law: it allows society to express its condemnation of certain conduct.
  - balfirevic 8y ago
    All of that seems to equally apply to a prosecutor going after runaway slaves and their accomplices at the time when slavery was legal and accepted in community, does it not?
  - ouid 8y ago
    Selective enforcement is absolutely a miscarriage of justice. Justice is the character of law that makes it fair. If you disagree with this, I would like to hear your defense.
    - pawelmurias 8y ago
      The world is an inherently unfair place so it's dubious that laws that attempt to regulate it should be fair.
gumby 8y ago
A friend of mine looked after his parents' house while they were on sabbatical. He rented it out for porn shoots. His mother was furious when she found out -- because he'd kept all the money himself. Now they use airBNB. Also a porn film was shot at the Stanford AI lab (the DC Powers building) in the 1970s. The first image I ever saw transmitted over the arpanet (around 1978) was a (very grainy) frame from this film.
- reilly3000 8y ago
  There are a million jokes, memes, fake stats, and even an Avenue Q song about how the Internet is for Porn. I just can’t believe it has roots that far back!
pontifier 8y ago
I hate our legal system. I don't have any faith that justice is found there.
Jedd 8y ago
> So he shot all the non-sex scenes first, then went back to film the required sex. This sounds a lot like the film Caligula, from 1979. They got Malcolm McDowell, Teresa Ann Savoy, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, John Steiner, John Gielgud etc - but re-shot a bunch of pornographic scenes long after principle photography had wrapped, and then edited the whole thing into what's now a bit of a cult classic, but at the time was banned by most countries censorship boards, disavowed by many who were involved in the production, and the subject of a swathe of legal attacks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula_(film)
lioon121 8y ago
tl;dr
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

215 points by eplanit 8y ago

The beginning talks about how likable the guy is. Greatly discusses the legal trouble his film caused. The ends with him agreeing how the film sucks and maybe the prosecutor was right! (EDIT: he says this as a joke, apparently this needs to be pointed out?) ... I get it. That’s a good story and he absolutely does come off as a likable guy.

unknownsavage 8y ago
For people who haven't read the article this is extremely misleading: > The ends with him agreeing how the film sucks and maybe the prosecutor was right! He says that, only as a joke that it's so bad it should've been illegal. While in reality a great mis-justice was done to the man, and he was railroaded into accepting a plea-deal due to the gravity of the unfair charges.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Yea, that’s the point. I don’t remember saying “don’t read the article”. He makes a joke about his previous work and that’s a likable thing to do.

jseliger 8y ago

The '70s seem to have been an interesting time: https://longreads.com/2019/04/29/what-i-learned-from-doing-amateur-porn/ https://longreads.com/2019/04/29/what-i-learned-from-doing-a... . Link is all text and presumably SFW, but caveat emptor.

joe_the_user 8y ago
I remember in an interview, Henry Miller contended that in the time before there was lot of media portrayals of sex that people actually engaged in sex more. It seems like the 70s were something of the time when the media began honestly representing the social undercurrent of sex. But that representation was perhaps part of it going away.
- dkarl 8y ago
  I think when something is pervasive but hidden, there's an urgent need as members of a social species to find out and become part of it. When it's discussed so openly, there's no fear of being out of the loop, just a decision of whether you think it's worth pursuing or not.
- Larrikin 8y ago
  There was a sexual comedy that came out some years ago that said the openness of sex led to an increase in social acceptance of more things out the norm. The main characters however complain that they missed out because they grew up in the 80s when HIV hit which led to a massive backlash and obvious public health scare. The characters are all friends and they eventually plan a party based on what they think they missed out on. The theory makes a little more sense to me.
- droidist2 8y ago
  The 70s were also the last decade before HIV/AIDS, I always thought that had a big impact.

kurthr 8y ago

Seems like maybe the writers of Boogie Nights were aware of this fiasco...

kgwgk 8y ago

What's "amateur" about that? It seems that the word appears only in the title. Edit: he had a $25k budget at least (over $150k adjusted for inflation) and while it was his first movie he hired professional performers and the intention was the commercial exhibition of the film in movie theaters (as it did happen).

Nevermark 8y ago
He was clearly an amateur since he had never made any kind of movie. But his intent was to make a professional/commercial film. They are not necessarily disjoint concepts. To top that off, at the end of the interview he gives himself a humorous critique suggesting he found his own work failed to make the professional grade.
- kgwgk 8y ago
  I wouldn't classify as "amateur" a commercial movie where the lead roles are played by professional actors, but that may be just me. The downvotes I got agree with you. (Being a bad movie may make it look "amateurish", but that's something different.)
  - reallydude 8y ago
    > a commercial movie where the lead roles are played by professional actors, I'm not sure you've gotten anywhere, describing what professional means, when you make it dependent on other entities as an explanation. There are plenty of bad SAG actors. What about just saying "union production"? Although I think that's the minimal bar, there have been non-union successes...which don't look professional to me. eg https://www.reddit.com/r/acting/comments/a59tum/what_are_the_most_successful_nonunion_films_if_any/ https://www.reddit.com/r/acting/comments/a59tum/what_are_the...
    - kgwgk 8y ago
      Are you suggesting that films can be classified as either “union” or “amateur”? Star Wars is an amateur film then. And saying “amateur porno” is redundant.

vezycash 8y ago

Summary: Young man has a passion & dream to make movies. He has a thriving business but it's not enough to fund the movie. His friends agree to fund a movie but with a clause - it must be a porno movie. He researches existing literature and it sucks. He won't make porn. He'll make a real movie that also has explicit sex. He shoots normal scenes first, and sex scenes later. Sex scenes has some issues like the actors unable to get erection and him not knowing how to direct the scenes. Movie is finished. He edits, distribution says he must include at least one lesbian scene, some cum shots... things he'd cut out. Movie is a success in theaters and gets sold out every single day and then all hell breaks loose. The police comes after him. Lots of complaints were sent to officials - some by people who hadn't actually watched the movie. The film maker had used a property owned by the church without permission and the church was the force behind the investigations. The court case was a sham. The investigators invokes anti-fornication laws 100s of years old. And the cops (probably) sets the film maker up. One of the lead actors commits suicide just as the case becomes a federal one. The government takes all the earnings of the film, fines him, bans him from film making for a few years and gives him a suspended jail sentence.

akvadrako 8y ago
Are you implying laws should be ignored after a few years go by? That’s not how laws work. Many of the laws that our important to daily life are hundreds of years old.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude
- madsmith 8y ago
  I think that’d be a wonderful thing if all laws had a natural sunset clause and were forced to be renewed to see if they confirm to the standards of the current society. Private lewdness was one of the charges. Even the prosecutor said that it was all a bit over the top but he had these laws as tools so he used them.

rayiner 8y ago

The more I learn about the 1970s the more the 1980s makes sense to me.

sharkweek 8y ago
I was born in the 80s so I have zero context for either decade. Recently watched the CNN documentaries on each decade and it was truly eye opening how nuts things were essentially every decade in one way or another. But above all of then, the 70s seemed like the WEIRDEST time to me. Highly recommend the documentaries - super informative. Was fun to re-live the 90s and 00s a bit too.

chinathrow 8y ago

Meanwhile the former Uber exec and now a16z general partner Andrew Chen is calling the Uber drivers "underclass". I have no words. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1125084951387357184 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1125084951387357184

eugeniub 8y ago
How are these two things related?
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  I assume in "having no words"? looks totally unrelated to me too

ohashi 8y ago

How unapologetic the prosecutor still is offends me. Trying to use anti fornication laws from 1796 and knowing it's a miscarriage of justice? Yet still thinks it's the right decision.

devereaux 8y ago
And he has blood on his hands. One of the actors committed suicide. There should have been some prosecution: not of the film maker, but on those who abused their power to harass people to the point of suicide.
rayiner 8y ago
The laws were on the books, and the public's opposition to what the movie-maker was doing seems to fit in with the intent and scope of the laws. Maybe you can blame him for selective enforcement, but I don't think that qualifies as a miscarriage of justice. (That is, of course, assuming we take at face value that his denial that he didn't steal and ship a copy of the movie to Oklahoma.) The prosecutor took measures to avoid normalizing what he and the community saw as deviant behaviors. That's one of the key purposes of law: it allows society to express its condemnation of certain conduct.
- balfirevic 8y ago
  All of that seems to equally apply to a prosecutor going after runaway slaves and their accomplices at the time when slavery was legal and accepted in community, does it not?
- ouid 8y ago
  Selective enforcement is absolutely a miscarriage of justice. Justice is the character of law that makes it fair. If you disagree with this, I would like to hear your defense.
  - pawelmurias 8y ago
    The world is an inherently unfair place so it's dubious that laws that attempt to regulate it should be fair.

gumby 8y ago

A friend of mine looked after his parents' house while they were on sabbatical. He rented it out for porn shoots. His mother was furious when she found out -- because he'd kept all the money himself. Now they use airBNB. Also a porn film was shot at the Stanford AI lab (the DC Powers building) in the 1970s. The first image I ever saw transmitted over the arpanet (around 1978) was a (very grainy) frame from this film.

reilly3000 8y ago
There are a million jokes, memes, fake stats, and even an Avenue Q song about how the Internet is for Porn. I just can’t believe it has roots that far back!

pontifier 8y ago

I hate our legal system. I don't have any faith that justice is found there.

Jedd 8y ago

> So he shot all the non-sex scenes first, then went back to film the required sex. This sounds a lot like the film Caligula, from 1979. They got Malcolm McDowell, Teresa Ann Savoy, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, John Steiner, John Gielgud etc - but re-shot a bunch of pornographic scenes long after principle photography had wrapped, and then edited the whole thing into what's now a bit of a cult classic, but at the time was banned by most countries censorship boards, disavowed by many who were involved in the production, and the subject of a swathe of legal attacks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula_(film)

lioon121 8y ago

tl;dr

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]